Yeast biotechnology

Mankind has exploited the metabolic activities of yeasts in baking and brewing for several millennia. The invention of the fed-batch technology for production of bakers' yeast has been a cornerstone of modern biotechnology, enabling the development of efficient production processes for antibiotics, biopharmaceuticals and technical enzymes. Alcoholic fermentation, on the other hand, is a model for microbial metabolite production and has become a major research focus for the manufacturing of biofuels. Expanding from our knowledge on bakers' yeast, diverse yeast species are explored today. The series highlights the latest research to produce biopharmaceuticals, enzymes, alcohols, organic acids, flavours and fine chemicals, underlining the huge potential of yeast biotechnology.

This collection of articles has not been sponsored and articles have undergone the journal’s standard peer-review process. The Guest Editors declare no competing interests.

Torulene and torularhodin represent the group of carotenoids and are synthesized by yeasts and fungi. The most important producers of these two compounds include yeasts of Rhodotorula and Sporobolomyces genera. T...

Cultivation of recombinant Pichia pastoris (Komagataella sp.) under hypoxic conditions has a strong positive effect on specific productivity when the glycolytic GAP promoter is used for recombinant protein expres...

Bacterial inclusion bodies (IBs) are non-toxic protein aggregates commonly produced in recombinant bacteria. They are formed by a mixture of highly stable amyloid-like fibrils and releasable protein species wi...

Glycosylation of flavonoids is a promising approach to improve the pharmacokinetic properties and biological activities of flavonoids. Recently, many efforts such as enzymatic biocatalysis and the engineered Esch...

The yeast amino acid catabolism plays an important role in flavour generation since higher alcohols and acetate esters, amino acid catabolism end products, are key components of overall flavour and aroma in fe...

Raspberry ketone is the primary aroma compound found in raspberries and naturally derived raspberry ketone is a valuable flavoring agent. The economic incentives for the production of raspberry ketone, combine...

With increasing concern about the environmental impact of a petroleum based economy, focus has shifted towards greener production strategies including metabolic engineering of microbes for the conversion of pl...

Several plant diterpenes have important biological properties. Among them, forskolin is a complex labdane-type diterpene whose biological activity stems from its ability to activate adenylyl cyclase and to ele...

Lactic acid is a versatile chemical platform with many different industrial applications. Yeasts have been demonstrated as attractive alternative to natural lactic acid producers since they can grow at low pH,...

Fermentative aromas play a key role in the organoleptic profile of young wines. Their production depends both on yeast strain and fermentation conditions. A present-day trend in the wine industry consists in d...

An advantageous but challenging approach to overcome the limited supply of petroleum and relieve the greenhouse effect is to produce bulk chemicals from renewable materials. Fatty alcohols, with a billion-doll...

Promoters are indispensable elements of a standardized parts collection for synthetic biology. Regulated promoters of a wide variety of well-defined induction ratios and expression strengths are highly interes...

Lignocellulosic substrates and pulping process streams are of increasing relevance to biorefineries for second generation biofuels and biochemical production. They are known to be rich in sugars and inhibitors...

Glutathione (GSH), a pivotal non-protein thiol, can be biosynthesized through three pathways in different organisms: (1) two consecutive enzymatic reactions catalyzed by γ-glutamylcysteine synthetase (Gsh1 or ...

Monoterpenes are important contributors to grape and wine aroma. Moreover, certain monoterpenes have been shown to display health benefits with antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, anticancer or hypotensive prope...

A Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain carrying deletions in all three pyruvate decarboxylase (PDC) genes (also called Pdc negative yeast) represents a non-ethanol producing platform strain for the production of pyruv...

Sugar alcohols have been widely applied in the fields of food and medicine owing to their unique properties. Compared to chemical production, microbial production of sugar alcohols has become attractive becaus...

Recombinant protein production in the yeast Pichia pastoris is usually based on the alcohol oxidase promoters pAOX1 and pAOX2, which are regulated by methanol and strongly repressed by other C-sources, like glyce...

One of the bottlenecks in production of biochemicals and pharmaceuticals in Saccharomyces cerevisiae is stable and homogeneous expression of pathway genes. Integration of genes into the genome of the production o...

The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is one of the oldest and most frequently used microorganisms in biotechnology with successful applications in the production of both bulk and fine chemicals. Yet, yeast research...

A moderate-temperature, astaxanthin-overproducing mutant strain (termed MK19) of Phaffia rhodozyma was generated in our laboratory. The intracellular astaxanthin content of MK19 was 17-fold higher than that of wi...

Apocarotenoids, like the C13-norisoprenoids, are natural compounds that contribute to the flavor and/or aroma of flowers and foods. They are produced in aromatic plants—like raspberries and roses—by the enzyma...

L-tyrosine is a common precursor for a wide range of valuable secondary metabolites, including benzylisoquinoline alkaloids (BIAs) and many polyketides. An industrially tractable yeast strain optimized for pro...

Wine yeasts can produce undesirable sulfur compounds during alcoholic fermentation, such as SO2 and H2S, in variable amounts depending mostly on the yeast strain but also on the conditions. However, although sulf...

Terpenoids (isoprenoids) have numerous applications in flavors, fragrances, drugs and biofuels. The number of microbially produced terpenoids is increasing as new biosynthetic pathways are being elucidated. Ho...

Measurement of mitochondrial ATP synthesis is a critical way to compare cellular energetic performance. However, fractionation of mitochondria requires large amounts of cells, lengthy purification procedures, ...

Omega hydroxy fatty acids (ω-OHFAs) are multifunctional compounds that act as the basis for the production of various industrial products with broad commercial and pharmaceutical implications. However, the ter...

Engineering dynamic, environmentally- and temporally-responsive control of gene expression is one of the principle objectives in the field of synthetic biology. Dynamic regulation is desirable because many eng...

The methylotrophic yeast, Pichia pastoris, is widely used as a useful experimental tool in protein engineering and production. It is common for proteins expressed in P. pastoris to exhibit N-glycosylation. In rec...

To achieve high-level production of non-native isoprenoid products, it requires the metabolic flux to be diverted from the production of sterols to the heterologous metabolic reactions. However, there are limi...

Targeting of cellular proteins to the extracellular environment is directed by a secretory signal sequence located at the N-terminus of a secretory protein. These signal sequences usually contain an N-terminal...

The hERG potassium channel is essential for repolarization of the cardiac action
potential. Due to this vital function, absence of unintended and potentially
life-threatening interactions with hERG is ...